A few minutes before we are scheduled to speak, I receive an email notification signaling that Merritt Wever has already joined our Zoom meeting. Given what I’ve read about her, I’m not surprised that she’d rather get this over with. She’s been a working actor for decades, accepting her first Emmy Award in 2013 with an instantly infamous 11-word speech: “Thanks so much. Thank you so much. I gotta go. Bye.” (She has won two more since.)
Wever has always been more comfortable talking about the work than herself, but she is anxious to find out what audiences—not just the critics who get to see it early—make of Primetime. (When, near the end of our conversation, I promise to relay to her publicist when my story is live, she deadpans, “I’ll brace for impact, as usual.”) The movie, documentarian Lance Oppenheim’s feature directorial debut, is a psychological thriller based on the work of Chris Hansen (played by Robert Pattinson), host of To Catch a Predator, the early-aughts NBC reality show that sought to lure and catch sex criminals on camera.
Pattinson is a convincing Hansen, entering the room and asking the predator, with his exacting diction, if he has a “big night planned?” Blown up for a movie-theater screen, what may have once played as a chilling enactment of justice is now more likely to receive rollicking laughter from its audience, so theatrical is Hansen’s moralizing.
What a difference two decades make. “I don’t think I realized that I was making a period piece,” Wever tells me. “To me, that was yesterday, but it’s been 20 years. Now we all have cameras. We all have the internet. You can probably Google and find any behavior on camera within seconds. So it’s a different world.”
Part of the appeal of Primetime is the nostalgia, yes, but more than that, it offers a glimpse behind the curtain at the stakes and sacrifices involved in making the show at its center. Core to that narrative is Wever’s character, the highly ambitious (and fictional) producer Andie Bender, Hansen’s right-hand woman. It is Andie who coaxes Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo), a 23-year-old reluctantly playing teenage jail bait, onto set for his first turn as “Decoy Dan.”
“Is there time for a rehearsal?” he asks her innocently.
“We’re gonna shoot the rehearsal,” she replies, holding his cheeks in her hands, and moments later, the cameras are rolling.
